156/Silence: People Watching
Sitting in a tour van somewhere near Atlanta, guitarist Jimmy Howell talks about the inspiration for 156/SILENCE’s new record People Watching. “You’re about to catch the bus and there’s just some guy sitting over there, and you don’t know if he’s going to be weird or do something, but you just want to stay away from him.” The latest haunt of the Pittsburgh metalcore outfit is an album intent on peeling away the skin of false facades to reveal the full horror of the subconscious. The band had put together the fleshy fourteen-track pulp of this project into abrasive breakdowns and harrowing whispering confessionals, which got a dangerous 9/10 review from the Distorted Sound team.
When vocalist Jack Murray wrote the lyrics, he “was looking out of the world, his perception and how it affects him or things around him.” Embodied in the ever-staring closeup of the record’s smiling figure, inspiration for which Jimmy states is from the APHEX TWIN’s I Care Because You Do cover, the record fully lingers into horror in a way that avoids gimmicks and creates unparalleled frenetic tension. 156/SILENCE have written their darkest album yet, a sound that the band have been trying to emulate for the last two album cycles.
The band are no strangers to the genre, with their entrance music during the sets is the dark crescendo to Ari Aster’s Hereditary. When Jimmy is making music – as he often writes the riffs for 156/SILENCE’s projects – he turns to the video games for inspiration, “I’ve pretty much been trying to rip off the Silent Hill soundtracks forever. Just like trying to incorporate those things like that. I’ve even watched videos on how they made it. There’s all these sampling things, they do, all this crazy stuff. I try to do that in a way that you can use in metalcore.” A long time fan of Twin Peaks and the Alien franchise, for People Watching Jimmy wanted to use the atmosphere of the films he loves as a foundation of the album, even using a quote from sci-fi thriller Ex Machina to open the album just because their drummer Kyle O’Connell thought it was cool.
The band decided to let Jonathan Dolese (who has worked with CANE HILL and D.R.U.G.S.) mesh more metalcore into their sound. “Every track has like 10 synths on it. Even if you don’t hear them, they’re there. And it has a ton of sound effects, all these little things that, like you probably wouldn’t have noticed before, just because of the production.” The secret formula for this album would involve complex layering, and creating peaks of high intensity sound and atmospheric build ups, which admittedly is Jimmy’s favourite part of the writing process.
Whilst the band has been known to make every album to be distinctly unique, People Watching is one of the first to let Jack’s singing voice shine. KORN and DEFTONES’ lingeringly creepy atmosphere was a key inspiration for the album, even using the iconic playground artwork as inspiration for the back of the record. In an admittedly Jonathan Davis style way, “Each [156/SILENCE] album has a unique thing. And that’s what I want to do with our band. Pick a new thing to introduce, and then go with that. Like for this one, it was more singing, and it was introducing the clean choruses in a way that didn’t feel out of place.” KORN really overshadows the tone of this record, especially in Jimmy’s favourite track Blood Loss, which wasn’t even meant to be on the album. This track also allowed the band to collaborate and experiment with THE CALLOUS DAOBOYS‘ Carson Pace’s vocals, a long term friend of Jimmy’s. “We felt like he should be on a strange song.”
People Watching also features some immense vocals from Craig Owens (DESTROY REBUILD UNTIL GOD SHOWS and CHIODOS), who had wrote his song Wants I Need with Jack before he was even asked to be on the record, and the low hardcore leaning Trae Roberts (MOUTH FOR WAR) during Change Agent.
Even still, experimentation led to some new creative choices for 156/SILENCE. Product Placement was the track the band took the most of a gamble on because it is the only song on the album that is mostly Jack’s singing vocals. “He just pulled it out and was like, I just went for it this time. And we were all just like, holy shit, dude. This is crazy. It was the first time we actually heard him sing like that.” However, one of the biggest challenges that the band faced for People Watching was Better Written Villain, with the second half of the song completely re-written and almost discarded from the final product. Alongside fan-favourite Character Development, Jimmy states, “It all just came together in the studio, and I think way happier. If you would ask me, before we recorded what songs would be singles, it would not have been those.”
156/SILENCE released People Watching two weeks into a heavy US tour with SIGNS OF THE SWARM, CANE HILL, OV SULFUR and A WAKE IN PROVIDENCE, a beautiful deathcore sandwich of bands (and also CANE HILL). Jimmy states that this is one of the band’s best tours yet, “these songs are doing better than any songs we’ve ever done before. So people knowing the words to new songs is very cool. And like literally more people coming to a show just for us than ever before.”
People Watching is out now via SharpTone Records.
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